


At Lammastide Fair

by StopTalkingAtMe



Category: Thief (Video Game Original Series), Thief (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-19
Updated: 2018-12-19
Packaged: 2019-09-23 00:14:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17069879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopTalkingAtMe/pseuds/StopTalkingAtMe
Summary: "It comes loping towards them out of the smoke and darkness, some fifteen feet high. Nothing but a man on stilts, Garrett thinks, dressed in a streaming coat of leaves, and crowned with antlers. As it passes them, it stops, silhouetted by the Lammastide bonfire. Beneath the hem of its tattered coat the stilts are tipped with the cloven hooves of a goat, trussed to the wooden poles with twine. It stoops towards Garrett and Yannis, its face in shadow as it regards them, marks them, and then moves on again with great leaping strides. Its hooves seem to make no impression in the grass."





	At Lammastide Fair

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hobbitdragon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hobbitdragon/gifts).



The moment Garrett steps into his tenement apartment with the weight of the Eye at his back, he knows. Inside it’s several degrees colder than the corridor, the air still and damp, but his senses sing out: something’s wrong, someone’s here.

The flickering glow from the street light seeps through the shutters. They’d be easy enough to jemmy open, the wood splintered and half-rotten, but they’re closed and the window is locked. If anyone has trespassed here while he’s been knee-deep in rubble and the dead, they didn’t get in that way.

He shuts the door and snaps the bolt into place, then presses his hand to the hilt of Constantine’s sword. He prowls the place, checking every corner, every shadow, even under the bed. There’s nothing there, and as far as he can tell there never was.

When he’s certain he’s alone, he lights a tallow candle and drops the Eye on the table.

It hasn’t spoken to him since they – since _he_ – escaped the quarantined section of the Old Quarter. So long ago he’s not certain it ever happened at all. He’s been feeling strange for a while, dizzy, a little light-headed, waves of heat radiating out from his core despite the bone-deep cold of winter. Almost feverish.

Good job he’s almost done. All he has to do now is hand the Eye over and collect his pay. He’ll give the sword back too, even though it’s much finer than the cheap blade he was making do with before. A generous gift, but Garrett mistrusts generous gifts. He can’t get used to it, to the way its weight and balance seems to shift, one moment heavy, the next unnaturally light. It throws him off.

He flexes his numbed fingers, checks the level of coal in the scuttle, and lights the fire. The change of clothes he laundered a day and a half ago hang at the hearth, still damp and now smelling of mildew. The glass in the windowpane is beaded with condensation and there’s a bite to the air, the crisp promise of snow in the flat leaden sky outside. It’s going to be a cold winter, followed by a bitter spring.

Through the thin walls he can hear his neighbours arguing, voices rising and falling.

He _is_ coming down with something.

The fire has caught, but despite the heat of the flames tightening the skin on his cheeks, they hardly seem to warm the room at all. Something about the way they dance and flicker catches his gaze. There’s a dizziness in his head, and with it comes the sensation again, the itch against his eardrums, like something’s talking, only he can’t hear their words. He straightens up, his head swimming, and he leans on the mantelpiece, feels in that instant another presence, a gaze fixed on the back of his neck. He swings around, moving on instinct back into the shadows, to a spot where he has some supplies hidden, a flash bomb to buy him a little time in case the bluecoats or, _worse_ , other thieves, come knocking at his door with all the subtlety of a battering ram.

Nothing there. Well... almost nothing.

The Eye sits on the table where he left it, wrapped in a length of oil cloth to protect it, although he has a feeling it’s not easily damaged. He isn’t thinking straight. Under normal circumstances, he’d already have stashed it away safely in one of his hiding places, ever mindful of the threat of other thieves. Instead he’d thrown it down. Like he was hoping to forget about it. Like he wanted to put it, and that mocking scratchy voice that he’s now not sure he heard at all, to the back of his mind.

Well, he’ll soon be rid of it. Just a day or two more and he can deliver it and be done with the whole damn mess. After he’s checked with his fence on the off-chance he might be able to find a better buyer, naturally. Garrett didn’t get where he is today through an excess of loyalty. And although the money Constantine offered is good, as far as Garrett’s concerned he’s already earned it five times over with everything he’s been through.

"Not that it hasn’t been fun," he murmurs, gaze still fixed on the Eye. And he waits, like it’s going to speak again. Like it’s going to answer him. It doesn’t, of course.

He fishes through the tins and jars and wrapped dry goods he’s got stashed away, hoping food will steady the queasy sensation in his stomach. A few bites of food rekindle his hunger, honing the pangs until they’re sharp enough to hurt, but after a few bites more, his appetite curdles and he’s left with a half-chewed mouthful that he has to swallow down with ale.

He feels restless, on edge. It reminds him of Constantine’s mansion, the niggling certainty that nothing about the job felt right, no matter how good the promised pay was. And he’d been right about that. They’d been testing him.

Garrett does not like being tested.

He unwraps the Eye. It’s named for the stone at its heart, which in Garrett’s judgement is dull and lacking lustre, a pallid blue lurking behind a milky cataract. If it ever saw at all, this eye is blind now. The setting is a sceptre, carved from some dense dark wood. Vines twist up the length of it, forming a spiral of slender needle-sharp thorns around the stone at the centre. It’s hideous.

He’s already put some feelers out – carefully, since it’s clear Viktoria is well-connected – but he isn’t holding out much hope. As thieves’ pawns go only Cutty would really have had the contacts for a piece as… unusual as this. More importantly, Cutty would have known how to go about asking without the whispers reaching Constantine and Viktoria. The only other likely candidates are guild-affiliated, and all to a man either too loyal or too gutless for Garrett to have faith in any promises of confidentiality they might make. Unless he wants to temporarily ally with a guild, but after what happened with the Downwinders it’s likely he’s burned his bridges there.

He wraps it back up in the oil cloth. The room has warmed up a little, enough that he’s willing to risk stripping off his outer layer of clothes that still reek faintly of decay. The bedclothes are damp to the touch as he slips between them.

Maybe trying to find another buyer is a waste of time. In theory it’s good to make them sweat a little, even if you don’t have any other buyers lined up, but now he’s got the Eye in front of him, he’s not sure he wants it hanging round much longer. He’s got a high tolerance for weird stuff, but it still gives him the creeps.

A taste lingers in his mouth. Not from his meagre, belated supper, nor the ale he washed it down with. This is an older taste, and sweeter, the warm rich flavour of honeyed brandy. The same drink Constantine served him, and which Garrett had drank, still stinging from the trickery and with a lingering feeling of unease.

Everything about that house had been wrong. The walls that fit together at strange angles, the sprawling gardens open to the sky, rich and lush with blossom and fruit as a hothouse despite the onset of winter, the monstrous stone faces leering out through curtains of ivy. It was a house designed and built by a madman. So he watched Constantine and weighed him up, knowing Viktoria was watching him in turn, her dark eyes unreadable and every bit as mocking as Constantine’s. And all the while, the heat of the brandy had coiled down his gullet, pooled in his belly, kindling the childhood hunger that lay forever dormant there.

He feels that same hunger now.

It’s been another poor harvest, thanks to the floods, the seemingly endless war. The shortages are getting worse. Word has it the Pagans have been getting restless, and the price of food creeps ever up. There’s already muttered whispers of rioting in the marketplace, more private guards in evidence. The fat years won’t be coming back any time soon, and once that thought would have terrified him. Maybe it still does.

He’s tasted it before, that sweet rich brandy, and he’s not sure it’s brandy at all.

He falls asleep. And he dreams of summer.

****

*

****

At first there is silence. For a little while. Few sounds rise up from the square below except for the soft clop of hooves from the horses and a curse word uttered through a coachman’s gritted teeth. The stink of the river is a living thing. It coils through the streets, filling the nostrils and making eyes sting. All right-thinking people know this is the sort of airless night that breeds ill-humours and spreads diseases.

It’s a warm sweaty night, a night of sticky skin and clammy scalps. A night for lying sprawled out on cool sheets with the blankets kicked off and the windows thrown wide open. All day the humid sweltering heat has lain over the City like a thick woollen blanket, and without a breeze to blow away the smog and clear the air, the onset of night has barely lessened it. No one with any sense would be working on a night like this. None but those who have no choice, bound to the pleasures of their masters. And those who are up to no good.

Perched well out of sight on a pair of warm copper pipes that provide a convenient ledge around the second storey of the Baron’s Exchange, a boy watches.

First there is silence, and then there is nothing but noise.

The first sign is a growing rumble in the depths of the Opera House. It sounds like the coming of a flood. Like perfectly calibrated clockwork automata, the liveried door men attend to their duties, and the Opera House disgorges its patrons down its steps. Some five hundred of the wealthiest nobles, merchants, and bankers flood the street, every man and woman amongst them bellowing and screeching in a vain effort to be heard over each other's clamour: high-pitched voices crow at the genius, the very _genius_ , of the artistes who have made their night's pleasure possible.

The Opera House's cupola is illuminated by lights tinted varying hues, which made the gilt and lacquered surface of the dome glimmer like a twilight sky. It resembles an elaborate ornate sugar sculpture, sweet enough to make Garrett's teeth itch. They itch even fiercer when he tries to picture the wealth and riches that might lie inside, ripe for the picking. Not that he'll ever have the guts. At street level the warm golden hue of the muted watch lights play over glistening silks and velvets and jewels. There are enough sparkles and shiny things down below to set Garrett's little magpie-heart a'flutter.

Not a world Garrett is used to, this. He never really ventured into this part of town, back in the time he’s started to think of as 'before'. It seems like a lifetime ago, that day, even though it isn’t. Three weeks and five days. He knows. He's been keeping track.

In New Market he knows every street and alley as intimately as he knows his own body. All the hiding spots, the culverts, the blind alleys and the switchbacks, the walls where the brickwork is crumbling just enough to let a light agile boy boost himself up and over and out of reach. New Market’s a cinch.

But the Old Quarter is Downwinder territory and the Downwinders are like a floating island of refuse on a filthy lake, sucking in more and more slurry and shit until it gradually spreads out to cover the entire lake. Garrett’s rarely been brave enough – or stupid enough – to risk showing his face this far north.

Half a century ago, the Old Quarter was the beating heart of the city. Now it’s grimy and gone to seed, with a faded shabby sort of glory, the white stone taking on a dingy hue from years of smoke. Most of the culls have moved out to the sprawling mansions in Hightowne and Auldale, but some of the wealth lingers on. It’s fashionable for wealthy noblemen, married or otherwise, to keep town houses in the crumbling Old Quarter, usually to allow convenient access to a mistress of their choice. When it comes to such matters, Garrett might be young, but he has the cynical clear-eyed view of a boy who grew up on the streets.

Below a footman boosts a lady as stately and proud as the figurehead of a ship into her carriage. It takes only a moment for her to disappear inside, and then several more for the sweep of her wine-coloured dress to follow, followed by a moment of doubt as to whether they'll be able to get the gilt door shut. Her carriage peels away down the cobbled street, and as another rolls up into its place Garrett bids a farewell to her formidably bejewelled décolletage, now out of his reach.

But not everyone here will be wealthy enough to afford a carriage, and even amongst those who can, there’ll be some who choose to walk. Garrett rises to a crouch, gaze darting around the crowd, trying to fix on a likely mark.

_There._

Towards the south side of the square, he picks out a pair of gentlemen, dressed very fine indeed, attempting to make their way towards the street that leads into the heart of the Old Quarter. They are accosted by a plump beringletted woman with the self-satisfied look of a pampered spaniel. At her side cringes a younger and rather more reluctant, but just as plump and beringletted, woman, her gaze fixed firmly on the ground. She looks far too like the older woman to be anything but her daughter, and she flinches as her mother taps the taller gentleman firmly and playfully in the chest with her fan. He is a slender willowy type with fashionably long golden hair and eyes concealed behind a pair of spectacles with small round lenses. His shoulders stiffen, and although Garrett can't see his eyes from this distance, he’s willing to bet the smile on his lips is a cold one.

The younger woman says something, a rosy flush suffusing her features, and tucks her arm through her mother's. Whatever she says isn't enough to stop her mother from simpering, but by now the gentlemen have had enough. The blond inclines his head with a cutting bow, and the two men amble on. The blond gentleman murmurs something to his companion, and whatever it is he says it draws a short hard laugh.

They head south and deeper into the old town. Off to their club, perhaps, for a night of gambling, or towards Gropecunt Lane for the very particular facilities that can be found there. No reason at all why they should see the shadow slipping along the side of the building after them.

The Hunter's Moon hangs full and fat in the sky. Not the best night for thievery, but for a boy who’s sharp-witted and hungry enough moonlight holds few fears. Garrett balances along the pipes, and eases his way carefully across an arch that marks the entrance to an inn's inner courtyard. On the other side, he sets his foot gingerly on a wooden windowsill that looks half-rotten, uncertain if it will take his weight.

_You're going to lose them. Got to be quicker._

As the two gentlemen take a turn to the east, he glances upwards, then rests his full weight on the sill. His stomach somersaults as the rotten wood gives a little, but it holds for long enough for him to swing up and onto the roof. He slides carefully down badly weathered, mossy tiles, and catches himself on a chimney.

Here in the Old Quarter the streets are clogged like sewers choked with solidified fat and matted hair, and the wealthy have no choice but to build up. They compete to outdo one another, to steal a few scant inches of space, to gleefully encroach on the views of others. If they could, no doubt they'd merrily colonise the sky itself. And thus the skyline of the Old Quarter seems to change with every passing year. Cupolas and domes spring up like mushrooms, and towers claw up towards the stars, then fall away to be replaced by taller sturdier monstrosities.

He keeps low to avoid himself being silhouetted against the moon as he sneaks along balconies, across alleys, over rooftops, past terraces. He’s only beginning to learn this second world above the rooftops, this secretive network of thoroughfares, rope ladders and breakneck bridges they call the thieves' highway. He’s heard it said, although he wasn't sure he believed it at the time, that the best thieves, the sharpest thieves, know how to get from one side of the City to the other without once ever having their soles touch the cobblestones.

"They take their boots off," he'd said, and earned himself a slap that set his ears ringing. Didn't take him long to learn to keep his smart remarks to himself. He might have doubted at the time, but now he's come to see and use it for himself, he knows better. Secret ways and esoteric knowledge, and didn't Artemus say something similar to him once, that first day? Thieves aren’t the only ones with secrets.

A second world hidden in the rooftops, and another beneath the city streets. That one he knows all about already. How many more secret worlds are there, hidden away? Part of the City but not truly part of it? Garrett means to find out.

He shimmies down a drainpipe, drops to the ground, and moves out into the street, passing through the flickering corona of light cast by an actinic street light. Its bronze trunk hums and sends a fizzing prickle rippling over his skin. From the open window of an inn comes the murmur and chatter of voices, a snatch of badly played pianoforte and a raucous woman's voice raised in song, accompanied by laughter. There’s the smell of food too, a stall doing a brisk trade in whelks and oysters liberally doused in vinegar, and Garrett's stomach clenches in sudden hunger. But he thinks he's spotted the blond gentleman ahead in the street, and there’s no time to indulge himself.

A flash of a light coloured coat, and there they are, his two culls, the crackling sulphurous glow of another street lamp reflecting on the blond man's spectacles. Garrett slips after them, easing his way through the crowd.

He never does catch up.

A group of women sit on the steps outside a tenement, heckling and spitting walnut shells at passers-by. A yellow dog sprawls across the pavement at their feet, nipples bright pink on its brindled belly. As he passes, a fragment of shell stings Garrett's cheek with a hot splatter of saliva. He swings around. The woman in their centre is blousy and flushed, her dark hair shot through with grey, but her face unlined. She’s half-dressed, her bodice unlaced to reveal a grubby yellowing shift that leaves her shoulders bare, and a mottled whorl of ink-dark circles has been tattooed on her left shoulder. She regards him with mocking insolence as she lifts a piece of walnut to her lips. Her tongue darts out to hook the fragment of nut inside her mouth.

"Something you wanted, boy?" she asks.

"You spat at me."

She lets out a chuckle. "Did you want an apology, then?" She brings another walnut to her mouth and crunches down. Her legs fall open, the skirts of her half-discarded dress draping like a curtains at a puppet show. "Or was it something else you were after?"

The heat in his cheeks intensifies. "An apology."

"What d'you reckon?" she calls out, dropping her head back. "Think he'd be any use to us?"

" _Him_?" A younger girl, her hair tied up and concealed under a headscarf, shoots him a contemptuous look. "What bes he, twelve? And City-bred. Gots the stink of it on him."

"A boy can't help where he was born, nor how old he is," Marian says, and the girl snorts. "Still..." Marian grins and fishes a walnut from the bag between her feet. She throws it to him so quickly he fumbles and drops it. "Ah. Now that's apt," she says. "Tell you what, boyo, hows about you fuck off and come back when your own nuts have dropped, eh?"

"I'm fourteen, I’m not a boy," Garrett says, his cheeks burning now. An old crone Garrett was certain was asleep stirs and fixes him with one rheumy eye. Her face is marked with scarification. An oval of raised bumps encircles one eye, and curls down her bony cheek to her chin like vines. When she sees him looking she draws back her purplish lips to reveal teeth filed into points and the tip of her tongue caught between them. Unnerved, Garrett draws back, no longer certain he wants an apology, no longer certain he wants anything at all from these women. He shoots a glance up the street after the culls and thinks he catches a glimpse of them. He stoops and swipes the walnut up from the flagstones, opening his mouth ready with an insult.

But as he straightens he sees movement in the doorway behind them, a writhing like the twisting of vines, and a sweet scent comes drifting out of the doorway. It’s ripe with bracken and moss and heather, as though the doorway opens not on a crowded reeking tenement, but on another world, one of fields and forests, rivers and glades.

Viktoria comes out of the door, stepping lightly from one world to the other, and she’s not dressed in the City clothes he’s seen her in, but in a dress of coarsely woven linen, and her hair is glossy and dark and falling loose, and she’s laughing at him.

He takes a step back, thinking that this isn’t how it’s supposed to happen. She’s not supposed to be here, not Viktoria. He doesn’t meet her until… until...

He can’t think.

She folds her arms, tilts her head. Offers him that dark wicked mocking smile. "Until you’re all grown up, Garrett?" she calls out softly, and the girl gives a bark of cruel laughter.

There’s a buzzing in his ears, like water trapped in the ears after diving underwater. He shudders involuntarily, raises his shoulder and rubs it against his ear. It’s as if his head is filled with flies, drumming against the inside of his skull.

The crone says something in a harsh grating tongue and cackles. Her tongue flicks out, snakelike, and beneath the flicker of the street light, the vines on her cheek seem to twist and coil. She catches him looking and winks, and when Garrett looks back at the doorway Viktoria has gone.

****

*

****

He wakes to the sound of a sonorous bell tolling through the compound, his body aching from its exertions and another night spent with nothing but a blanket between him and the cold stone. He goes still for a moment, old instincts kicking in, then sets his hands against the floor and slides out from beneath the bed. There are no windows in his little cell, which is deep in the building with the Builder knows how many miles of stone between him and the sky, but some trickery of the Keepers makes the initiate dormitories darken and lighten with the rising and setting of the sun despite the absence of natural light.

At the basin he gives himself a half-hearted scrub with a linen cloth, then throws it aside, and dashes a handful of water against his face. He rakes his fingers through his hair, scratching at his scalp furiously, especially at the spot behind his right ear where there’s a suspicious twitch of movement. If Keeper Jerenne suspects she hasn’t quite eliminated every louse, there’s a risk she might try to have him bathed again. He gives his armpits a tentative sniff, hesitates, then splashes more water against them.

He pulls on his robes and hesitates at the closed door. In the corridor he can hear shuffling feet, what sounds like a clump of three or four people. No voices, though, no conversation this early, only a loud, over-emphasised yawn. Just his imagination that they seem to pause for a few moments outside his door, perhaps, but his heart picks up its pace as he waits for them to move on. He considers briefly that he might not need to join them for breakfast, the same thought he has every morning, but a resentful growl from his belly tells him exactly where he can stick that idea.

When he's certain they're gone, he slips out into the corridor, hearing behind him more footsteps, and these ones sound a little more lively. Garrett hurries down to the refectory, eager that they not catch up with him.

In the refectory, he joins the queue lining up at the table where the food is piled. A few faces turn his way, and Garrett, his unwillingness to make eye contact a choking thing, keeps his head down, his gaze firmly fixed on the back of the boy in front of him. He serves himself from the selection, holding back, careful not to give himself noticeably more than the other boys even though he could quite happily keep piling his plate higher and higher and damn it, he wants to.

With a sly little glance around, he slips some cheese and a bread roll into the pockets of his robes, before moving quickly away to choose a quiet spot to sit, the legs of his chair scraping against the stone. As he eats, taking sips from his heavily sweetened hot chocolate, the faint murmur of voices begins to strengthen as the chocolate and coffee self-served from the ancient brass samovars chase away the veil of sleep. After breakfast it will be off to the scribing rooms, and then there’ll be no chance for anyone to utter a word for several hours.

Footsteps are coming his way. Garrett keeps his head down, focusing on ripping into the bread. "Hey..." a voice says, then hesitates, trailing off. There’s a nervous clearing of a throat. "You, um... do you mind if I..."

Garrett glances up at the other boy through his fringe of dark hair, resentful of the attention he’s bringing their way. He knows without having to look that Seb and Avery are watching, and that fact alone causes a knot of dread to tighten in his chest. The boy standing over his table shuffles his feet. Yannis, who’s just as edgy and nervous in his own skin as Garrett, only not hiding it nearly as well. He's supposed to be literate, but he stumbles over the words when he reads, and blots pages with ink. A week ago, while trying to cut down a quill he gashed his thumb and bled all over a book, which, judging by the horrified reaction of the adult Keepers, was a bit like running down the aisle of a Hammerite chapel stark naked in the middle of a mass and taking a piss in the chalice. Yannis had burst into tears.

Garrett shrugs, and drops his head down back to his food.

"Free City."

"Thanks..." Yannis hesitates as if he hadn’t really expected the answer to be yes, then pulls out a chair and sets down his tray. Instantly the stink of coffee assaults Garrett's nostrils, turning his stomach. The murmur of conversation seems to Garrett a little more intense than before. If he looks up now, he's pretty sure a fair number of faces will be looking at their table, and he feels a hot surge of resentment at Yannis for sitting with him.

There’s silence for a long few moments while Yannis fusses over his breakfast, making sure his bread is buttered, his coffee heavily sugared, and then he stirs and stirs and fucking stirs, the spoon clinking against the inside of his mug. He doesn't actually seem to be doing any actual eating. And he's watching Garrett, Garrett can tell, can sense how Yannis keeps shifting his weight from buttock to buttock, working up the courage to speak. And Garrett eats in silence, willing him to keep his mouth shut and leave him alone.

It’s the instinct of the misfit, especially one like Garrett, who's been fending for himself most of his life, to know his or her place on the scale. Despite coming from a family that presumably has some wealth, Yannis is a fair few rungs beneath Garrett, and is trying to claw his way upwards. Trying to find an ally.

He's going to be disappointed.

"Is it true?" Yannis asks, when he finally summons up the courage to speak.

"Is what true?"

"That you’ve been sneaking out."

Garrett’s gaze snaps up. He opens his mouth, but can’t think of anything to say. Yannis's eyes widen in excitement.

"It _is_ , isn’t it?"

" _Shut up_." His voice whips out, hard enough to make Yannis flinch. Not hard enough to get him to drop the subject, although he does at least lower his voice.

"Sorry... But you have, though, haven't you? Out into the City?"

"No. Don't be stupid." Garrett drops his gaze, stares down at his plate. His heart is racing, his mouth dry with fright. If this gets out, if the Keepers realise he's figured out a way out of the compound, then...

Then _what_? He's still not entirely sure what he's so afraid they'll do, whether he's scared they'll kick him back out into the streets, or patch up the holes in the net. Nor is he sure he's right to be afraid – while he doesn't like the way Orlund looks at him with open disgust and contempt, it’s not like that’s an expression Garrett isn’t already used to. Orlund isn’t dangerous. If he was, Garrett would know by now. Strangely though, despite Artemus acting as his ally, Garrett is less certain about him. There's an edge to that man, old as he is; he's a blade that could cut one way or the other.

Yannis has been silent. When Garrett risks a glance, hoping against hope that the boy will have dropped the subject, he finds him grinning, his eyes bright with what he must think is a shared conspiracy. Garrett's heart sinks.

There is no way he can argue his way out of this.

He leans forwards, fills his voice with as much venom as he can muster. He isn't impressive physically, but he doesn't have to be to beat seven kinds of shit out of _Yannis_ and both boys know it. "If you tell anyone-"

"I won't! I'd never, I swear." Yannis curls his hand around the symbol of the key at his throat that marks them all out as initiates. "On our duty as Keepers."

"If you tell anyone I'll make you regret it."

"Understood. My lips are sealed." The hurt has gone. Yannis is like a kicked puppy-dog, ready to bounce back, cringing and bouncing at the heels of its cruel master. "Where do you go?"

"Nowhere. Just out."

"Into the City?"

"Yeah."

"So... um..." And Yannis is back to stirring his coffee again. Garrett bites back a snapped word of irritation: why doesn't he just drink the damn thing? "Will you tell me how you do it?"

"Do what?"

"Get out. Because the main doors are locked and the enforcers..." - And it’s definitely not Garrett's imagination that Yannis pales a little here. There’s a slight softening in Garrett's heart towards the other boy; he thought no one else was bothered by the enforcers except him. – "Well, it’s said they never sleep and if they get you, then..."

"What would happen?" Garrett asks. "If an enforcer catches you?"

"Oh. Well, I... I'm not sure." Yannis glances around then, fearfully, as if he half-expected an enforcer to be lurking behind him. "But it won't be anything good, I'm sure. So how..."

"It's a secret."

"I promise I won't tell."

Garrett shakes his head.

There’s a brief flash of hurt in Yannis's eyes before it submerges again. "Isn't it dangerous, though? In the City at night?"

Garrett represses a snort of irritation. What does this idiot boy think he's been doing all his life? "I know how to handle myself." And then, because his own curiosity is starting to get the best of him, "Don't you ever get out of here?"

"Occasionally."

"Time off for good behaviour?"

Yannis's laugh is a little too loud. Garrett stiffens, feels eyes on his back. "It's not like we're prisoners," Yannis says, although the way he squints up his face makes Garrett wonder how true that actually is.

"How often do you get out?"

"A couple of times a year. It'll be more often when we’re acolytes. I was hoping to get out for the Lammastide Fair this summer. I don’t think it’ll be running for much longer. Officially that is." He curls both hands around his coffee. "The Hammerites’ll never kill it off completely."

Lammastide. There’s an itch down his spine at the thought of it, the Pagan festival to celebrate the reaping of the wheat. He thinks of the Pagan women he saw last night, sprawled on their step to escape the sweltering heat trap of their tenement. In the doorway behind them, he pictures a woman he’s never seen before but seems somehow still to know, watching him with dark mocking eyes. Vines twine around her, crowding out through the doorway, coiling up around the lintel and burrowing their way into the brickwork. In a strange trick of the light and shadow, her skin seems not skin, but darker, rougher, as if she were a sculpture hewn from bark.

There’s a sharp stab of pain, like a stiletto dagger piercing his skull between his eyes. He sees a stone in his mind’s eye, pale blue and burning with cold blue fire.

 _Such an interesting life you have led, boy,_ it whispers. _But a painful one. So many petty resentments and grudges you nurse._

He hears his name being spoken at a distance. He starts, finds Yannis staring at him, and behind him a sea of eyes turned his way. There’s whispering at the edges of the room, at the edge of his hearing, but he can’t see any heads leaning together, or any mouths moving. It’s a faint distant rustle that sets the hairs on his arms on end. An enforcer. He glances over his shoulder, but there are several walls between him and it, and it's already receding, the itching whisper fading into silence.

"Are you all right?" Yannis reaches out to touch his arm, and Garrett wrenches away, glaring at him, because anger seems easier than unease. Yannis drops his gaze and stares down at the table, a dull flush suffusing his features. Garrett swallows down his guilt, pushes away the inner voice that whispers he could be friends with this boy. He reaches for his hot chocolate. It smells different. Its bitter acrid scent has changed, he realises in the instant before he drinks, but it’s too late to stop himself and the honeyed brandywine floods his mouth.

 _Let’s see, little man_ , the Eye whispers. _Let’s see what else there is._

****

*

****

He sees the world beneath the City. Layer upon layer upon layer of sunken temples and ancient mass graves. The subterranean world of lost children, with its entrances through which no adult can fit and if they could they’d come to regret it, and where they speak a mangled pidgin tongue, one that Garrett used to speak himself but which he has forgotten. The Keepers’ scribing rooms, countless heads bent over sloping tables. Himself, learning how to fight.

The fragments of memories stream through his mind, faster than he can follow, some hazy and half-forgotten, others with the sharp-edged glint of a still-keen blade.

The Eye leads him through the corridors of Constantine’s twisted mansion, to a place where the flooring begins to cant out from beneath his footing, spiralling around and up, until the floor lies above, the ceiling below. And there is worse: a room where the floor drops away, some pointlessly clever-clever _trompe l’oeil_ trickery of light and shadow, and with a sickening drop of his belly he is surrounded by nothingness, by empty space. He tosses a copper coin into the void, and waits to hear it drop. There is no sound, all surfaces of the room carpeted with black velvet to swallow any noise. It must be deeper than he thought, though, since he cannot see the glint of the coin.

 _Unless it’s real,_ the Eye comments slyly. _You’ve seen stranger than this, little man._

And as if to prove this it shows him.

The light reflects on the eyes of the children that crouch like carrion birds on every ledge and culvert of the sewer cistern, vast as a cathedral. Water drips. Skittering movements at the edge of his vision. The sewer reek that still comes seeping out of his pores from time to time. He’s shed this life, but he’ll never be free of it.

The cistern’s vaulted ceiling and walls are criss-crossed with a network of ropes and planks stolen netting from the docks, a spider’s web of rigging which children swarm along, and he notices now that not all the children look entirely human. Some have webbing between their fingers, protuberant eyes, and thin dark lips. The in-between-ones, the ones who swim too deep.

It shows him the third night of the Clemency Day riots, the night when Avery and Seb hauled him out from under his bed and beat the living shit out of him. He’d lied to Artemus afterwards – because Thou Shalt Not Snitch is the only law in his life he’s ever had faith in and it still applies even when you’ve got a concussion and two broken ribs – told him he’d sneaked out and got caught up in the riots, and knew even as the words left his mouth that Artemus knew full well he was lying.

It shows him the acrid reek of magecraft and necromancy. It shows him the dead: righteous haunts and shambling corpses both. It shows him a thousand and one memories and not one of them is quite right. It shows him a crowd parting unknowingly for a figure who walks amongst them, while all sound fades to a muted underwater hush.

"What the hell do you want from me?" he demands.

There is no reply. He doesn’t need one. He already knows the answer. The Eye wants the same thing that anyone has ever wanted from him: to use him in whatever way it can, to wring him dry until there’s nothing left, not the slightest drop.

And then it shows him his mother.

Artemus once told him that their first responsibility as Keepers is to watch and record. They never change events, unless explicitly advocated. To be a Keeper is to walk across a field blanketed with new-fallen snow and not leave a single footprint. And yet to witness an event is to change it. To recall a memory is to change it, and each time you remember you change it a little more.

He remembers this now as he stares at his mother’s back, a painful knot in his throat. For some reason here in this part of the dream, he’s a fully grown man, and he holds the Eye’s sceptre clasped tight in his hand. He cannot remember her face. He’s reached for this memory once too often and her features have blurred, running together like candle wax until only impressions remain – the threads of silver at the temples, her hand reaching down to ruffle his hair as he snatches at something hot and sweet straight from the oven. The exact details of her face have been lost to him for decades. If she turns around it will chip away a little more of the memory, perhaps even destroy it completely, and still he desperately wants her to. If he could, he would have gone forward and turned her round himself, but he is fixed to the spot, unable to move, unable even to speak, and then he’s snatched away, and she’s gone, lost to his dreams again as he screams at the Eye to bring her back.

****

*

****

Then he’s older, back in the early days after he left the Keepers, the hard scrabble days as he scrambled to survive in a world he found he didn’t remember quite as well as he thought. He seeks out old contacts, makes inroads into the possibility of joining a guild, and it’s Cutty, of all people, who advises against it.

He doesn’t, Cutty tells him one night in a coffee shop in Slipspindle Way, have the first clue about the world these days.

They’re both crowded into the booth, the flimsy curtain pulled across to screen out the raucous conversation. Cutty’s drinking peppery ginger wine, Garrett a bitter but heavily sweetened hot chocolate.

"You’ve been away a long time, puppy. You’re a wee flightless baby bird some good soul, a Hammerite soul, I’d reckon, rescued as a kindness. What d’you think’ll happen to that wee fluffy baby bird when the aforementioned good soul delivers it back to its nest?"

"They throw it a party and stuff worms down its gullet?"

"Your throat’ll be slit before the week’s out. And you’d know that, puppy, if you had any sense worth a damn."

Garrett clenches his jaw, and tries again, sitting forward, voice lowered urgently. "I’m good, Cutty. You know I am. Put a word in with Ferro-"

Cutty gives him a weary look. "Ferro’s gone. Toshers found him floating in the Auldale underwarrens a few weeks back. His cousin’s heading the guild now, but word is the warden’s looking his way askance and there’s daggers out already, but-" Cutty heaves his bulk forward, stabbing a finger at the table, "-more to the point, you want me to help _you_ vault over the heads of all his fine lieutenants? The blooded ones that dragged themselves up from the streets? Taffing hell, boy, _think_. Use your brains if you have any worth a damn. You’d be lucky to make it a day. You start with the dregs or you don’t start at all."

He’s right. Damn him, he’s right.

For the first time, Garrett is at a loss. A myriad of passageways await his decision, but all seem fraught and shadowed, or lead back the way he’s come. He doesn’t want to admit, either to Cutty or to himself, how afraid he is that he’s lost his way.

But Cutty’s not done. "’Course," he says, "that only matters if you want to go guild. It’d be different for an independent." Garrett warily lifts his gaze, and Cutty keeps him waiting, taking a swig of the ginger wine, running his thumb around the rib of the bottle’s neck. "Might be I’ve been thinking of going independent myself."

"They’d kill you too. And you’re a bigger target than I am."

"Stow it, pup, and tell me, is there a fence in the City better than me?"

He opens his mouth to come out with a smart-mouthed comment, shuts it when he sees the look of warning Cutty shoots him. He’s tolerant, this thief’s pawn, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a limit to how far Garrett can push him. He twitches a shoulder up, waits for whatever nugget of wisdom Cutty’s about to impart.

Cutty stabs his finger at the pitted surface of the table for emphasis. "There’s two options for an artful independent, puppy: first, be worth more to them alive than dead..." He indicates himself with an oddly delicate gesture. Cutty may be fat, but he started his career as a goldsmith’s apprentice, and there’s a delicacy to his fingers that belies his bulk and clumsy demeanour.

Garrett considers this. "What’s the other option?" he asks.

Cutty counts it off and winks. "Be too good for the taffers to catch."

Garrett grins.

****

*

****

But dodging thieves is easier than dodging Keepers.

He knew they’d come for him eventually. A month and a half in the end he spends dodging from tenement to tenement, forever looking over his shoulder. With half an eye out in every crowd for the figures walking unseen. He could do it himself too in those days, to Cutty’s uneasy disapproval, but it doesn’t work on everyone and it certainly won’t work on Keepers.

Every time he reaches for the glyphs, he knows he’s running out of time.

He’s been out of the Keepers almost a month and a half before they come for him. He can sense some of their hidden doorways as he makes his way about the city, one above a slaughterhouse in the Old Quarter shambles, another in the piss-reeking alley at the back of the Crippled Burrick, but there’s no doorway anywhere near the tenement where Garrett lives, not that he knows of.

And then there is.

He feels its opening as an unfurling in his chest and when he turns around Artemus is there. The plaster on the wall behind him is ruptured with cracks but otherwise whole, with no sign of either glyph or doorway. An enforcer stands beside him, the faintest glimmer of its golden mask in the depths of the shadows beneath its hood. Garrett was expecting Artemus, but not the enforcer, although if he’d had the guts to give it a moment’s thought rather than baulking from it at every turn, he might have known better.

They’re here to kill him.

"Took you long enough."

Artemus’s face is expressionless. The enforcer’s face is concealed, as ever, beneath its featureless mask, but cold focused fury seethes about it like smoke. Rarely has Garrett been so close to one of them, and his skin crawls at the sensation, the repellent wrongness of it. It was a person once, one of his fellow apprentices, perhaps, stripped of his or her humanity. There’d been talk, briefly courted, of Garrett becoming one of their number as a means of keeping his anger in balance. He’d been tempted once. The thought of it makes him shudder now.

"I apologise if we kept you waiting," Artemus says. "I’m afraid we were unavoidably detained."

"By?"

"The council had to sit to determine what action should be taken. It has been many years since we have had to deal with an apostate."

"I’m not the first?" His voice is rough, distracted. His gaze keeps flicking back to the enforcer. There’s a static fizzing hum in the centre of his mind, where its soulless, soundless voice will pierce like a needle when it speaks. No answer from Artemus, who watches him, solemn as an executioner, the sort that takes his job seriously and doesn’t get pot-valiant before every afternoon of sanctioned slaughter. And then, because Garrett knows that’s not a question he’s likely to get a useful answer to: "Are you going to share the council’s decision with me? Or are you just here to kill me?"

"There were some who called for your death."

He considers fighting, but he’d be dead before he blinked. The enforcer stirs as if it senses the tenor of his thoughts. The light plays over the dull golden metal. A glimmer of wet eyeball deep in the hole. There’s something familiar about it.

"Let me guess, Orlund."

"Keeper Orlund has always been over-cautious."

"Yeah, and he hates me. How many of the others agreed with him?" He hesitates with a cold shiver of dread and the question ‘Did _you_ agree with him?’ on his lips, but he can’t make himself say it. He doesn’t want to know the answer to that particular question.

"There is a precedent."

"’And, lo, for apostates are worse even than heretics, therefore must their punishment be cruel indeed,’" Garrett intones, his voice low and dark and bitter, "’For a heretic may know not what he casts away, yet an apostate betrays all he once held dear.’ I guess the Hammerites got it right after all."

"Had you progressed further in your training, Garrett, we would have had no recourse. You picked your moment well."

He feels a brief piercing moment of hope. They’re going to let him go, he thinks, but even as the thought enters his mind, he knows he’s wrong. He has to be. If they were going to let him go, Artemus would not have brought the enforcer. There’ll be a price to pay for his freedom; there always is.

"What do you want?"

"There is knowledge in your possession that belongs to the Keepers. And not all of it honestly gained. How many times did you visit the sections of the library that were denied to you?"

"If you’re going to insist on calling it the ‘Forbidden Library’ what do you expect?"

The faintest hint of a smile at the corner of Artemus’s mouth. "Curiosity is not a crime. We are not the jealous guardians of knowledge that you believe us to be, Garrett, but it is a dangerous path you walk when you use our arts for questionable ends."

"To keep a roof over my head. To keep myself fed."

"For now." Artemus’s expression is mild. "Tell me, Garrett, how long do you believe you will be content with merely surviving with all our stolen knowledge courses through your veins? You already grow restless, do you not?"

Garrett’s throat tightens with fury. He starts towards the Keeper, then catches himself, turns away. "If you’re going to kill me, do it. I’m done with lectures. Kill me, old man, or leave me alone."

"I would strongly prefer not to have to kill you, Garrett," Artemus says quietly. "But I will, if necessary."

"I’m not coming back."

"No, you have made that clear. But there is an alternative, a certain glyph that if applied will remove from you the ability to use your magic."

"And if I don’t agree?" Garrett’s voice grates, his throat sore. "That’s why the enforcer is here. To deal with me if I refuse to let you-" He stops, draws his knuckles across his mouth. "- _hobble_ me?"

In his mind, he hears Cutty’s voice reminding him if he was good enough, he wouldn’t need magic. It doesn’t help and Artemus does not answer.

"So," Garrett says, drawing out the words, "it’s death, crippling me with your damn glyph or back to the Keepers and lifelong servitude to a bunch of books. Not much of a choice."

The enforcer takes a slow deliberate step towards him, and Garrett draws back. There’s something about the way the thing moves that seems painfully familiar. He draws in a sharp breath in sudden recognition. "That’s..."

 _Avery_ , he thinks with revulsion edged with fear. One of the initiates who’d done his damnedest to make Garrett’s life in the compound an unmitigated misery. Why him? Of all the enforcers Artemus could have brought with him, why that one? Is it a message? And if so is it meant as an apology, or as a warning?

He turns his gaze back to Artemus again, swallows hard, then nods. "Fine. Do it." And he sits down, curls his hands around the arms of the chair, trying not to flinch as Artemus comes up behind him. The Keeper can move almost as silently as Garrett, but his footsteps are audible, deliberately so, Garrett suspects.

"You are certain?"

He closes his eyes. "Just get it over with and then get out and don’t come back," he snaps, and then he does flinch at the cool touch of Artemus’s hands on his temples. He braces himself, but he’s not, and never could be, prepared for just how much it’s going to hurt.

****

*

****

It comes loping towards them out of the smoke and darkness, some fifteen feet high. Nothing but a man on stilts, Garrett thinks, dressed in a streaming coat of leaves, and crowned with antlers. As it passes them, it stops, silhouetted by the Lammastide bonfire. Beneath the hem of its tattered coat the stilts are tipped with the cloven hooves of a goat, trussed to the wooden poles with twine. It stoops towards Garrett and Yannis, its face in shadow as it regards them, marks them, and then moves on again with great leaping strides. Its hooves seem to make no impression in the grass.

With the pressing heat of the fire, Garrett feels suddenly faint in its wake, and Yannis doesn’t help, thumping his elbow into Garrett’s ribs and raising his voice to be heard over the clamour of the fair. "You look like you’ve seen a ghost."

Garrett shakes his head, wipes his mouth. Looks around for the antlered figure, although he really doesn’t want to see it again – something about those little prancing hooves make his skin creep. It’s tall enough he should be able to see it over the stalls, but it’s lost in the crowd.

The brandywine, perhaps. Making him see things that aren’t there, or at least see them differently. A common thing at Lammastide it’s said.

Sweet-scented smoke billows out from a stall, leaving him giddy. As they wander, they pass a Hammerite preacher, bellowing to be heard over the noise of the fair. He catches Garrett’s uneasy glance and turns the full force of the spittle-flecked litany on them, chasing them through the crowd a little way until they dodge down a turning and lose him in the crush.

"Makes you wonder how long this can go on," Yannis murmurs. He glances at Garrett. "It feels different this year, don’t you think?"

He shrugs, but Yannis is right; it does feel different. There’s an edge to the festivities. There have always been fanatics like the Hammerite preaching damnation, but they’ve mostly been ignored or subjected to, at the most, good-natured heckling. Now the jeerers are hostile, those that dare. Others skirt around the Hammerite, hiding their faces, looking away.

"Mind you," Yannis murmurs, "I never stayed this late before."

"The Keepers had a curfew?"

Yannis shakes his head. "This was before I became an initiate. Before my family forgot me. I’d go with my sisters. It wouldn’t have been right for them to stay after dark."

Maids shriek with glee as they flee past, pursued by a couple of capering tumblers dressed as surprisingly realistic fawns. They wear oversized carved wooden phalluses loosely slung between their hairy thighs.

"I bet they wanted to," Garrett says.

Yannis elbows him in the ribs again. "That’s my _sisters_ you’re talking about."

Garrett hesitates, throat tightening. And still, unwillingly, the words seem to force their way out of him. "I dreamed about my mother."

Yannis stares at him.

Garrett looks away. A distant part of him is aware that this isn’t real. He can’t remember if he told Yannis this or not, that first time around, can’t remember anything about this night except how drunk they’d got on the stolen Pagan brandywine. And what he thought he’d seen afterwards. "I can’t remember what she looks like."

Very quietly, Yannis says, "Oh."

He holds his hand out without looking and Yannis places the bottle into it. Garrett takes a swig. The bonfire has left traces on his vision, like falling stars scorching the sky. "I’ve been seeing things."

"You mean like visions?"

Garrett shakes his head. "It’s like I’m dreaming. Like someone’s in my head, flicking through my memories like they’re pages in a book. How old am I?"

"I don’t know exactly. Sixteen?"

Garrett shakes his head. "I’m older. A lot older. And I’m not a Keeper anymore. I left." He turns a hard smile on Yannis. "I’ve turned into an angry bitter old man."

"Angry and bitter? Huh. I wonder how that happened, ‘cause that doesn’t sound like you at _all_."

Garrett gives him a look.

Yannis shrugs. "Well, maybe it’s trying to tell you something."

"Like what?"

"How the hell should I know? It’s your dream. Maybe you took a wrong turn somewhere along the way. Made a bad decision."

"I’m pretty sure I’ve made several."

"Well, there you go then. But maybe it’s not too late to put it right."

He smells roasting meat, and it sets his mouth to watering. And still he wants suddenly to be as far away from here as possible. Yannis is right: something is coming. But isn’t that the point of Lammastide, the Pagans celebrating the promised return of their god? Or are they celebrating the fact that the Trickster hasn’t come back _yet_?

They pass a smaller fire on the outskirts where music plays: the frantic pace of a fiddle, the contagious foot-pounding rhythm of a drumbeat. A Pagan girl pulls Yannis, laughing and flushed, into the dance, leaving Garrett alone. He melts back into the shadows, bringing the brandywine to his lips. Even the scent of it seems enough to intoxicate him. The firelight flickers and dances, burning brighter with every sip.

A hobby horse prances its way closer to the crowd, a mechanism in the horse’s painted black skull that makes the jaw snap shut. A man wearing the mask of a rat with curving yellow teeth as long as Garrett’s little finger capers around the hobby horse, a mangy monkey in a tattered red coat perched on his shoulder. It screeches at Garrett, baring its sharp little teeth, tail tightening around the rat-thing’s neck. The mummers pass and he follows them with his gaze, drawing back into the darkness, away from the light.

The ground beneath his feet shifts and he stumbles. One moment he’s on the commons outside the City walls, and the next a forest is growing up about him, ripping through stalls and tents and canvas, the canopy spreading to blot out the stars.

 _The lilacs and the thistleaids_ , he thinks, and there is a weight to the words, a meaning that Garrett cannot grasp. Something he’s forgotten, perhaps, or something that hasn’t happened yet.

The light of the fire seems impossibly distant. He stumbles towards it, then stops. There’s something there.

Something stands between him and the fire, between him and the light, a figure so tall it blots out the sky. Its cloven hooves rest lightly on the leaf litter where they make no impression. It has shed its coat, and beneath he sees not the man on stilts, but furred thighs and a naked chest inscribed with sigils.

He stumbles backwards, deeper into the forest, deeper into the shadow, then turns to run. Blunders blindly, unseeing, into a thorn bush. A sudden searing pain in his eye, and he screams.

His eyes snap open. He gasps for breath.

It’s gone, the goat-hooved creature, and Yannis is staring down at him, flushed from the heat of the fire, hair in disarray. Behind him the Pagan girl looks on dubiously.

"Bes he drunk?" she asks, then grins. "Or not drunk enough?" There’s a glint in her eye as she glances at Yannis.

Garrett jerks away and turns around, half expecting to see the forest behind him. Nothing there, only the stalls of the fair, and the distant cliff face of the City walls. He starts towards them.

Yannis calls his name behind him, but Garrett keeps moving, without looking back. Hands seem to grasp at him as he passes and they put him in mind of thorns catching at his clothes. Blood rushes in his ears and it feels like he’s going to faint, and then he finds the hobby horse before him again, the firelight glinting on its skull. It snaps its teeth at him.

He jerks away, takes turns at random, but his normally excellent sense of direction has deserted him, and he only succeeds in winding himself deeper into the labyrinth until he’s facing the vast pyre at its centre, the wicker sculpture of the Trickster, aflame. The antlered thing is there too, but it’s no longer the monstrous thing he saw in the ancient forest, just a man a little worse for wear teetering on stilts, his crown of antlers slipping. Somehow that makes it worse.

Yannis has caught up and catches hold of him.

"Let go of me." He jerks away. "Can’t you just leave me alone?"

"What the hell’s wrong with you? Did you see something back there?"

He’s already shaking his head, drawing away. "I didn’t see anything," he says, his voice hollow. "I didn’t see a damn thing."

"Garrett-"

He relents, lets Yannis grip his arm and lead him away to the quieter outskirts of the fair. There the air is cooler, less claustrophobic.

"You all right?" Yannis asks, and he nods. Then, without warning, Yannis punches him in the arm, and not gently.

" _Ow_."

"You arsehole," Yannis says with feeling. "You bastard shit. That Pagan girl was going to sleep with me."

He laughs, can’t help himself. This feels like marginally safer ground. "You’re lying."

"I’m bloody not," Yannis says mournfully.

Garrett pushes his hair back. It’s getting long enough to retain the natural curl, and his scalp is clammy with sweat. "Go back if you want. Find her again."

"Too late now. I’ve probably missed my chance." Yannis glances at him. "What did you see?"

"Nothing." Although now, with the smoke clouding his thoughts, he’s not sure he could remember even if he wanted to. It wasn’t a vision, he thinks; it couldn’t be, and even if it was a vision it was a useless one, but if the Keepers think otherwise, if they think he has the sight, they’ll _never_ let him leave.

He swings towards Yannis, ready with a threat, and freezes.

In his hand, pointing towards the ground, Yannis holds the Eye.

Garrett’s heart hammers against his ribs, "Where did you get that? It’s mine."

Yannis lifts the Eye, rests the end of it lightly on the splayed palm of his other hand. He stares at it as if he doesn’t quite understand what it is. He looks different, Garrett realises. The chubbiness in his face is starting to melt away, the man he’ll become beginning to emerge. "You’re not really stupid enough to think this’ll earn you your fortune, are you?"

"It’s priceless."

"It’s _worthless_. Unless you know what it can do."

"What can it do?"

Yannis shrugs. "Take it to Artemus. Find out for yourself."

"Is _that_ what this is about?" Him creeping back to the Keepers, like a whipped dog with its tail between its legs. A boy who’d never belonged there in the first place, illiterate and damaged. Most of the others had been like Yannis, from families which had links with the Keepers that went back generations, and were resentful of Garrett’s presence amongst them. Seb and Avery were the obvious examples, but they weren’t the only ones, just the most vicious. "None of this is real, is it? It’s just something the Keepers cooked up to bring me back."

He flinches away as Yannis lifts his hand, but he only traces a glyph on Garrett’s forehead, his touch feather-light. He gives no answer, but Garrett knows the truth already: the Keepers would never interfere like this. His uneasy gaze drops to the Eye, but while he can sense its regard, that doesn’t feel right either. The vision – if it was a vision – is already fading, like a dream forgotten soon after waking, but the memory is still buried somewhere inside his mind.

He remembers Artemus appearing out of nowhere in his tenement, which of course this version of himself shouldn’t be able to remember since it hasn’t happened yet.

That was the moment, he thinks, the moment he started to forget. Every scrap of magic locked away inside his mind, until the Eye came along to stir things up. And perhaps it’s not the Keepers, who, even if they claim otherwise, aren’t beyond interfering but never like this, or the Eye, which only watches with implacable curiosity, but some fragment of Garrett himself that Artemus locked away almost a decade ago. And with that fragment bubbles up a warning he’d almost forgotten, of the darkness that’s coming for him.

And he wishes suddenly in that moment that he never learned about the Keepers.

Talented he might have been, but it was never going to be enough and Artemus must have known that. They both should have turned away, Garrett thinks. What would have happened if he’d let Artemus vanish in the crowd? If he’d deliberately forgotten what he’d seen that day and let his life run its normal course?

"The door’s still ajar, Garrett," Yannis says quietly. "It always was."

****

*

****

When he wakes the fire has gone out and it’s so cold his breath frosts on the air. He burrows down deeper into the blankets, but sleep is elusive, and eventually he caves, slipping shivering out from the bed to relight the fire.

The dream’s already breaking up, but one remaining image lingers: Garrett, crouching on an isolated patch of parquet floor that floats in an ocean of darkness. He couldn’t break the illusion with a coin, but perhaps he could with something bigger. And he tosses the Eye away, the precious priceless Eye that’ll finally put him in a position where he won’t have to worry ever again about the day-to-day scrabble of survival, or the looming spectre of starvation, the one that’s been haunting him since he was a boy – and he waits for it to hit the bottom, knowing that its path will cross with his again.

There’s more, of course, but he can’t remember, although he can’t shake the niggling feeling that it’s important.

After he’s relit the fire, he uncovers the Eye, and studies it, thinking of how the Keepers sealed it away. They’ll do the same again, he knows, squirrelling it away with all their useless hoarded knowledge, and all his work, all his effort, all the risks he’s taken, all will go to waste. Most of the profit he’s already made he’s already frittered away on rent and food and the paraphernalia of his profession. He should have asked Constantine for half his pay up front. Ah well. He’ll know better next time.

It’s not much of a choice he has, but then the important ones never are. He has, after all, already paid the price for his freedom. He just wishes he could shake the feeling that there’s another larger instalment that’s about to come due.

And with the Eye still and silent but ever watchful, he makes his decision.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Tafferling for betaing.


End file.
